Rania Al Jazairi is a Visiting Fellow at the Council on Middle East Studies in September and October of 2014. She is currently working on a project on “Transitional Justice in Syria: the role and contribution of Syrian refugees.”

Marco Demichelis is Visiting Research Fellow at the Council on Middle East Studies in Spring and Summer 2014. He is working on a new essay on Fana' al-Nar (Annihilation of the Hell) within Islamic Eschatology and Kalam. He is also Research Fellow in Islamic Studies and History of Middle East, since 2013, within the Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Milan.

After earning his PhD in History of Islamic Thought at the University of Genoa in (M.A. Dalarna Hogskolan, M.A. University of Turin, B.A. University of Turin), Dr. Demichelis has recently published (Ananke: Turin, 2013) a History of Arab World, a pedagogical text for undergraduates, following the release of his PhD Thesis, by Harmattan (Turin, 2011), on the theological and political thought of Mu‘tazilite school between VIII and XII centuries. Marco Demichelis’ academic articles have been published in Oriente Moderno, JNES, Annali di Scienze Religiose, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, Parole de l'Orient and other relevant peer review journals.

Yasmine Farouk is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Council on Middle East Studies from September 2014 to May 2015. Her academic research focuses on the international relations of the Middle East, with special focus on inter-Arab relations, and the foreign policies of authoritarian regimes. Her research at CMES will focus on the foreign policies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria in reaction to the American intervention in Iraq and to the Arab uprisings.

Yasmine is on leave as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science in Cairo University. She is also an AUC Forum fellow at the American University in Cairo. She has previously worked as a consultant with the offices of the United Nations Development Program in Cairo and the regional office in Beirut. From September 2012 to June 2013, she was head of the Civil Society Unit at the Social Contract Center, a research unit affiliated to the office of the Egyptian Prime Minister.

Mohamed Kerrou is a Carnegie Centennial Scholar and Visiting Professor at the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University. He is currently engaged in a project assessing Tunisian Local Governance, implemented in collaboration with Professor Ellen Lust in the Program on Governance and Local Development at Yale University.

Dr. Kerrou is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar. He also teaches at the Master of Mediterranean and Cultural Studies at the University of Rovira I Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. He is a Correspondent Member of the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts “Beit al-Hikma” in Carthage, Tunis. He has interests in civil society and politics, with a particular focus on the role of gender, religion and identity. Mohamed Kerrou has published several books and articles. His lastest book is: Habib Bourguiba Jr. Entretiens (Tunis: Ceres Editions 2013).

Dhafer Malouche is a Carnegie Centennial Scholar and Visiting Associate Professor at the Council on Middle East Studies. He is working closely with the Program on Governance and Local Development with Professor Ellen Lust.

Dhafer Malouche is Associate Professor in Statistics at the Higher School of Statistics and Data Analysis of the University of Carthage in Tunisia. He is working on several fields related to statistics and data analysis, including Sensor Analysis and consumer preferences applied on olive oils, Bayesian networks and Graphical Models. He is a member in an ANR project (France) on Designing of Well Being monitoring systems used for early detection of challenging behavior, such as stress and people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). He is also a senior researcher Associate at the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis where he is working on the relationships between causes of death and climatic conditions. He is also a former Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Statistics at Stanford University between May and July 2011.

Saghar Sadeghian is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Middle East Studies with the Yale Program in Iranian Studies and is supported in part by the Taslimi Foundation. Her primary research focuses on the notions of nationality, constitution and modern institutions in Iran and Afghanistan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her PhD thesis, Non-Muslim Communities in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution, investigates four major Non-Muslim communities: Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Babi/Baha’is, in local and national levels as well as in relation to the foreign affairs policy, in order to describe how these communities fitted in the Shiʻa society. Saghar presented political, social and economic life of these communities. The situation of these communities were compared before and after the Constitutional Revolution and the changes were shown in the context of modernization. She consulted several archives in Iran, France and the U.K. and used many original documents in her research. For her current research, Saghar works on her thesis for a book publication besides working on The Concept of Citizenship in the Constitutional Parliaments (1906-1941). Saghar explores particularly the situation of women, Non-Muslims and marginal tribes and nomads in this period. She is also helping with Yale Iranian History Internet Archives (YIHA). She teaches a course on Citizenship in Modern Iran and Afghanistan.

Hania Sholkamy is a Carnegie Centennial Scholar and Visiting Associate Professor at the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University. She is currently engaged in collaboration with Professor Ellen Lust in the Program on Governance and Local Development at Yale University. While at Yale, she will be working on the social construction of the state through its services; a research focus that examines the practices of the state in the fields of poverty alleviation and social protection.

Hania Sholkamy is an Egyptian anthropologist with a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, The University of London. She obtained her BA and MA from the American University in Cairo (AUC). She is currently associate research professor at the Social Research Center of the AUC and is special advisor to the minister of social solidarity of Egypt working on social protection program design and implementation (on a volunteer basis). Prior to her current position she was assistant professor of anthropology in the department of anthropology of the AUC and the regional coordinator of the “Pathways to Women’s Empowerment Research Consortium” in partnership with the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, UK. She is also a member of the board of the Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Her research interests and publications are mainly in the fields of gender, women’s rights and work, social protection, health, population and qualitative methods. She has co-edited two volumes, one titled “Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography” (OUP) with S. Szreter and A. Dharmalingam, and another titled “Health and Identity in Egypt” (AUC press) with F. Ghanam.

Eric van Lit is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on Middle East Studies from September 2014 to June 2015. His main interests lie in Islamic intellectual history, in particular philosophy from the late medieval and early modern period. His doctoral research at Utrecht University was on the commentary tradition on Suhrawardī, tracing the development of the notion of the 'world of image' (ʿālam al-mithāl) from Avicenna and Suhrawardī in the twelfth century up to the present. At Yale, he is conducting research on the reception of Tahāfut al-falāsifah (the incoherence of the philosophers), written by the famous eleventh century theologian Ghazālī. The philosophical brilliance of this book is broadly acknowledged by modern scholarship, but little is known about the reception by Islamic intellectuals themselves. In addition to his research, Van Lit is concerned with the growing importance of technology in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies, on which he writes on his weblog.

Rami Nakhla, also known by his alias Malath Aumran, is a pro-democracy activist who has advocated for political reform in Syria since the mid-2000s. Currently, he is creating a Syrian-led peace initiative in coordination with international interventions. Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, Rami has worked to inform the world of human rights violations and atrocities committed against protestors. In early 2011, in response to threats from Syrian government security forces, Rami fled to Lebanon, continued to coordinate with activists on the ground and played a key role in organizing nonviolent protests in Syria. He was a spokesperson for the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) of Syria, and a member of the Syrian National Council. From 2012-2013, Rami served as Program Specialist at the US Institute of Peace, coordinating "The Day After" (TDA) project which produced a transition roadmap for post-conflict Syria. He later became TDA’s Executive Director working to implement the transition plan.

Amira Yahyaoui is a Tunisian human rights advocate and founder of the award winning Al Bawsala, a public policy and accountability NGO. Through Marsad (monitor in Arabic), Al Baswala monitors the work of the Tunisian Parliament, the Constitutional Assembly and Tunisian city halls, using technology to make information accessible to citizens. While still a teenager, Amira was banned from her homeland for her activism and fled to Paris where she was stateless for several years. Following her country’s revolution in 2011, Amira returned to Tunisia for the transition and writing of the Tunisian constitution. She won a Vital Voices Global Trailblazer award in 2012 for women transforming the Middle East and was named top 100 most powerful Arab women by Arabian Business Magazine.

Alexander Verbeek is Strategic Policy Advisor on Global Issues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands working on international issues related to climate, water, food, energy and resources. He collaborates with governments, businesses, think tanks and civil society agencies to find connections between these issues and create solutions for the environmental, resource and demographic challenges of the 21st century. Alexander has been working as a diplomat for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1992. Prior to his current position Alexander was Policy coordinator for the Gulf Region. He had postings in Vienna (OSCE), Bonn and London. At MFA headquarters in The Hague, he also worked for six years in the security department and for several years in the Asia department. Alexander studied Human Geography in Utrecht (MSc.), worked as a journalist and was an officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy before joining the MFA.